Research on Digital Simulation Platform for Networked Substation

Communication network plays an important role in substation automation system. Industrial Ethernet will replace the parallel wires and extend to process level. Therefore, the substation network should be carefully designed according to the system function constrains, network performance, cost, maintainability and expansibility. Since the design of substation network could not be accomplished only by experience or theoretic calculation, digital simulation platform will become an appropriate method. This paper discusses the necessity of digital simulation platform, which consists of simulation kernel, network analyzer, time server, various simulation models and common graphics platform. It also discusses the simulation process of the digital simulation platform. And simulation models, simulation kernel, network analyzer and other issues to be solved are presented.